Communication Echo Chambers Are Making You Depressed

February 16, 2026 Newsletter

If you’ve taken the train at least once in the past two months, chances are you’ve seen a particular ad glued to the walls: plain white background, Times New Roman font, and an air of mystery. The actual product being advertised is not easily deciphered. Although you may be thinking of the infamous Friend.com campaign that inundated quite literally every blank surface of the MTA for the last four months of 2025, I am talking about Meeno.com’s “Rejection is hot”, equally prolific billboards.

Photo by Abby Schleifer

For the purposes of context, Friend.com is an AI companion pendant that, for the cost of 129$, can survey your every move, record your surroundings, and generate a tailor-made conversation available to you at all hours of the day. The Friend.com campaign quickly spawned rather widespread backlash. Its immaculate white backgrounds were swiftly foiled by graffiti that highlighted the perverse nature of such a product that capitalizes on people’s loneliness and pigeonholes them into increasingly individualized relationships. Meeno.com however seems to be marketing itself as the less egregiously dystopian iteration of Friend.com, even replicating the unplanned graffitied esthetic of the latter by including a simulated sharpie, marking the words: “meet people irl” with a black arrow pointing to the website name.

Meeno.com was founded in 2023 by Renate Nyborg, the ex-CEO of Tinder. The app is an “AI powered relationship mentoring app” that, on its website, defines itself as a “voice-based sparring partner that gives you courage to meet people IRL”. It is designed to, allegedly, help you “figure out how to navigate tough interpersonal relationships”. In a 2023 article from the magazine Fast Company, the journalist illustrates Meeno’s functions with the example of someone wanting to break up with their partner and “not knowing how”. Instead of say, turning to a friend or family member for such advice, you can pay a monthly subscription fee for Meeno to advise you with a “tip along the lines of being honest, empathetic, and clear.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, I didn’t initially intend to talk about AI. Although tech companies are indeed using AI to capitalize on real feelings of loneliness, I would argue that the conditions that created said isolation were met much earlier in the 21st century. The arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and subsequent ubiquity of smartphones and social media by the early 2010’s, allowed for the rise of individualized modes of communication. The age of essentially talking to yourself was established.

Metaphorically this has been extensively documented and critiqued by way of algorithm bubbles, echo chambers, and social media profiles essentially serving as stages for self-performance where we our both the actor and our own audience. The literal aspect of this however, I feel has been under discussed. Texting is still Gen Z’s primary mode of communicating. Yet since the advent of voice messages (first introduced on iMessage in 2014, Snapchat in 2016, and Instagram in 2018), and longer form videos on social media (introduced on Instagram in 2018), I would argue that both the former and the latter are beginning to rival texting as our generation’s predominant mode of communicating with each other.

Communicating via either the voice message or sending videos allow for a deferred response on behalf of the other person. Not only does this create a fragmented and halted conversation, but as each participant responds to the other, they are essentially engaging in a conversation with themselves, thus raising the question of if dialogue is even possible through these means.

Of course, fragmented conversations have long pre-dated our modern modes of communication, letters being an obvious example. However, because presumably handwritten, the letter conserves something of the writer’s personality and singularity by way of their style of handwriting. Texting, on the other hand, although allowing for a less fragmented form of dialogue, restricts us to a singular typeface, thus homogenizing all speech into one visual language. Thus, when looking at a text-chain, except for the colors of the text-boxes, there is no visual distinction between your words and the person who you’re talking to. Expanding further, there is also no visual distinction between the conversation you’re having with one person, versus virtually any other conversation you could have with anyone else. A flattening of personhood takes place here, leaving you aware of only your own subjectivity: since you could essentially be talking to anybody, you are in a way, ultimately talking to yourself.

To clarify, I understand communication to be a polymorphous activity that is in no way limited to an in person conversation or dialogue. Indeed, many forms of communication don’t include language whatsoever. I’m bringing this up however because I believe that, because of the central place they occupy in modern sociability, these individualized modes of communication have stunted our abilities to meaningfully connect with one another. This, along with other products of neo-liberalism like the privatization of public services and encouraged individualism, has majorly contributed to widespread feelings of isolation.

Not only are prolonged feelings of solitude simply bad for human health, isolation is also a perfect breeding grounds for fascism: because we feel so disconnected from one another, it is easier to demonize certain groups as being the cause for our suffering. We can therefore draw a direct link from Big Tech, to loneliness, to the rampaging terrorism being brought on by ICE.

AI companies (along with dating apps – a topic for a whole other article) will of course only exacerbate this loneliness, and make themselves richer by doing so. Being cognizant of this at least, is already a first step in fighting back.

Ksenija Carleton

Assistant Editor